Warblers

While I was writing and drawing for my assignments, summer visitors had already come. Although I am still far away from finishing them, I went out for birdwatching because spring comes only once in a year and I'm not sure if I can stay here next year. I was surprised to hear Cuckoo here in April because in Japan it is usually spotted after May.

It became a day to learn warblers.
英語のWarblerという言葉は幅が広い。ムシクイもセンニュウもヨシキリも、ウグイス科はみんなWarblerだ。



Grasshopper Warbler（ヤチセンニュウ）
We were lucky enough to see it closely! Its eye-stripe is pale and thin. But Reed Warbler （ヨーロッパヨシキリ）has more plain face and the color is more orange with no pattern on its back. Reed Warbler was hidden in the reed and didn't allow me to sketch...



Sedge Warbler（スゲヨシキリ）
has bold black eye-stripe and obvious cream eyebrow. The one that I sketched had a ring on its leg. In England, I've seen ringed birds more often than in Japan.
3種の中ではスゲヨシキリが一番、オオヨシキリやコヨシキリに鳴き方が近かった。

Coloring eggs

From the middle of March, I was asked to keep the skin of onions for Easter. And this is what they are for!



ブルガリア人のハウスメイトが教えてくれたイースター・エッグの染め方。
Just by boiling eggs with onion skins, they became beautiful reddish brown. I tried it as well with two of my eggs and off course with some piece of paper! The paper became yellow and my fingers brown.

There is a Japanese story by Naoko Awa called Kitsune no Mado or Fox Window.
The fox dyes people's fingers with balloonflower. If you make a rhombic window with your thumbs and index fingers colored by him, you can see whatever you want through it. I wonder what we can see through the window colored with onion.

朝の鐘

We got a room with a view, not in Florence but in Venice.
In the morning, I sat on the window sill and looked down the square, hearing the people walking and pulling the roller bags on the cobblestones. At seven o'clock the first bell of the day rang.
I would love to live in a place where a bell rings.

City on the Lagoon

We hopped on the train after the Book Fair to Venice.
Most of the people got off the train at stazione di Venezia Mestre and there were only four of us in the car. Suddenly, we could see the sea from both sides of the car. We went into the lagoon.



I was impressed by the idea of settling on a marsh and building a whole city on millions of wood poles. There are certainly many people living on a former marsh in the world, even some familiar places for me: here in East Anglia and also in Bangkok! But these places were reclaimed by drainage building canals. I also know that some people are living in floating houses on lakes like the one I stayed in Klong Ya national park in Thailand last spring. But these are just some houses, not the entire city like Venice.
If the sea level rises in the future and even more places become half sank in the sea, we may all have to build a city like Venice...


Since it is just one month after the disaster in Japan, I can't help thinking about earthquakes and Tsunami. Venice is still there soundly because earthquakes seldom happen there and it faces the Adriatic Sea in the Mediterranean Sea. Tsunami is an acute disaster while acqua alta or high tide is more chronic.


Building the inflatable barriers at the canal gate would work better and be more reliable for acqua alta than building breakwaters for Tsunami. However, those constructions are always based on an estimate. It may be about the height of the water coming in or the effect to the current, environment. But when it comes to nature, we cannot calculate everything, so such estimates very often turn out to be wrong. And it seems that the more we try to overcome or resist the nature with hardware, the bigger the damage caused by a hundred-year or a thousand-year event.


If I could be a travel journalist, my first topic would be "Living on the water".

Bologna

Not many people who visit Bologna for a few days will draw this park at the edge of the city. But when we first arrived there, we waited for the bus to our hostel here and could not do anything but sitting...so I was drawing. And this became the only one piece drawn in Bologna since I was at the Bologna Children's Book Fair for the rest of my stay.



I can not forget the Cioccolata calda (hot chocolate) that I had after this drawing because it was super delicious! Italian hot chocolates are really thick and not like normal Japanese or British ones, which seem to be watery after experiencing that.

今回の旅の一番の目的は、ボローニャ・チルドレンズ・ブック・フェア（ボローニャ国際児童図書展）だった。クラスのほぼ全員、教授陣も3人が参加したので、授業の一部のようなものだ。
会場では、とにかくたくさんの出版社が、たくさんの絵本を並べている。これが世界の絵本マーケットの縮図だろうか。
国や出版社によって出している絵本のテイストがずいぶん違う。
イラストレータよろしく、わたしも自分の作品のダミーを持ち歩き、いくつかのブースで見せてみたのだが、作品に対する反応も様々だった。イタリアやフランスでは、自然科学の絵本であっても芸術的、文化的なものが好まれるらしく、写実的に自然を描写したわたしの絵は"Too British"だそうだ。わたしは自然をそのまま記録する、自然博物学タイプの思考をしているけれど、エッセンスを取り出し芸術として表現する自然の絵本という路線もある。国による自然観の違いは、こんなところにも現れているのかもしれない。
　自分の作りたい本のイメージと各出版社のブースに並べられた絵本を比べ、商品としての絵本、自分の作品のマーケットについて考えさせられた。でも、学生として学んでいるあと一年間は、マーケットを気にせず、やりたいことを追求すればいい、という友達の言葉も正解だと思った。



Snow Forest, my work from last module.

日光浴

What will you do if you only have a day to stay in Florence?



We spent whole afternoon sitting at the Piazzale Michelangelo and by the San Miniato al Monte. Looking down the beautiful city, feeling the happy sun was enough on its own to enjoy Firenze. I learned a lot from my friends about the way of traveling.



Although I was the most restless person among our group...sketching and watching birds.
In Italy there were many Blackcaps. Maybe their number is big in winter since some birds migrate from north to stay over.

フィレンツェの眺め

Walking in Florence, I felt as if I were in a movie. Narrow alley ways, orange roof tops, yellow walls with green windows and the blue hills for the back ground...everything was pictorial. Mountain skyline is what I'm missing in East Anglia.



「フィレンツェのドゥオモは愛しあう者たちのドゥオモなの」
フィレンツェの町がすべて見渡せる。ついドゥオモはどこだろうと探してしまう。



Ponte Vecchio
It is said that in Europe, there were several bridges with houses on it like the Ponte Vecchio. I believe the London Bridge was also one of them because there is the scene in the novel "London" by Edward Rutherfurd when Tiffany falls down in to the river Themes from a window of a house on the bridge...just like Lauretta says in the aria.

さくら咲く

Somehow, sometime I can not connect to the Internet for more than an hour in my house. When it happen, I go out for a while. It's far better than trying to connect again and again and being frustrated.

Surprisingly, cherry trees are already in full blossom here and people are walking around with T-shirts.
Hope the cherry blossom season will arrive soon in Japan as well to cheer people up.



日本でサクラといえば、年度の変わり目で、別れや出会いとともに散りゆくのを眺める、感慨深い花だ。でも、イギリスのCherry blossomは天真爛漫に春を謳歌している。

10日ほど、クラスのみんなとボローニャ・ブック・フェア＋αの旅に出かけてきます。

Energy

These days I found myself not concentrating on anything and spending a lot of time browsing news on the megaquake and tsunami that devastated Japan. Since here in England, everything is going as usual, I have to keep up with the normal pace as well. So I end up working till midnight, using a lot of electricity.



When I came here, I felt it inconvenient that all the shops and arcades closed around five to six o'clock in the evening. But after hearing about the planned power outage in Japan and many shops limiting their opening hours because of that, I thought it is actually nice to open only daytime in terms of saving electricity.
Some of my friends here said that it is quite normal to have three hour blackout in their countries. The more we have high-tech equipment in our house, the more difficult it becomes to live without electricity.
It seems to be the time when we start thinking of what kind of service we really need and what is not. This earthquake can be a good opportunity to change our way of life.

On the other hand, I feel sorry to hear that many cultural events and activities have been cancelled because of the earthquake. Admittedly in this situation, nobody would feel like doing anything unnecessary to have fun, using electricity and making public transportation even more crowded.
The next few years to come will be a hard time for us, who are doing activities like a bubble.

情報連鎖

　最初に地震のことを知ったのは、「無事です」と流れてくるメーリングリストのメッセージからだった。
mixiやTwitterで身近な人や場所の様子もなんとなく見えてくる。逆にこちらの友達、海外の友人からは、家族は大丈夫？というメッセージがFacebookにたくさん寄せられた。
　横浜の家は長時間、停電していたらしく、ずいぶん長いこと連絡は入ってこなかったけれど、何がわかったとしてもイギリスにいたのでは何もできないしと思い、何か言ってくることを待つことにした。こんなときは、無駄に心配して、情報網を混線させるのに一役買っても仕方ない。



そしていま、またあちこちのMLから、ガス爆発や電力不足に対する行動指針をうたったチェーンメールがたくさん流れてくる。本当なのかもしれないし、デマなのかもしれない。
さして問題になる内容でもないけれど、これを読んだ多くの人が無意識に同じように行動し出したとき、
何か大きな波になりそうだ。人々が情報に飢えていて、何かしなくてはならない気がするけれど、何をして良いかわからないとき、ぽんと出てきた情報はすごい勢いで広まっていく。

現場にいないから、こんな悠長なことを思い巡らしていられるのだけれど、いまの情報網について、つい考えてしまった。